If you ask any marketer about the fresh ides they have in mind for next year’s strategy, there is a pretty healthy chance that influencer marketing will be involved. In the past few years, we have all become aware of the measurable benefits that influencer marketing brings; increased website traffic, trust building through association, expansive brand exposure and gaining access to a new target audience.

Sounds pretty good right? That’s because it is. But the difficult part is matching your brand and product with the correct ‘on-brand’ influencer. In response an emergence of influencer marketing agencies have been set up to represent influential social media personalities and design campaigns that work effectively for your brand and the influencer.

These agencies have proven to put out some fantastic and innovative campaigns that have boosted awareness and driven sales up. This post will talk you through some of our favourite agencies followed by some examples of their best work. Let us know what your favourite campaign from the list was.

Social Chain

Location: Offices in Manchester, London, New York and Berlin.

Category of work: Too many to categorise, these guy work with a wide range of clients from Thomas Cook to Apple Music.

Social Chain is a global social media marketing agency. In 2014 Steve Bartlett started grouping together individuals who had an influence over the trending topics on social media channels. Nowadays, Social Chain pride themselves on their ability to mould and alter the topics that individuals engage with on social media channels. Rather than reaching out to other influencers, these guys are the influencers.

In one of our favourite campaigns from Social Chain, the team paired up with Nike and ASOS to promote #FindItWithNike across social media channels. The product is an image search tool that allows you to find the items of clothing online that you have taken pictures of. By using a combined network of over 400 million followers and a little help from Facebook and Twitter (videos and memes), the project became one of the UK’s highest performing social media campaigns. #FindItWithNike eventually reached over 20.3 million people, with over 160,000 link click-throughs.

Goat Agency

The Goat agency is a rapidly growing team of innovators, looking to mix up and alter the traditional forms of advertising. The ethos driving the current of their business? To ‘deliver performance driven guaranteed results to legitimise and professionalise a disjointed industry’. This particular agency believes strongly in social communities and builds worldwide relationships. Any influencer will be considered for campaigns, there are no limits to their category of work.

In a campaign to spread brand awareness and increase the sales of Lidl beauty products (IPL kit and nail dryer), the Goat agency teamed up with beauty and lifestyle influencers. The campaign used both macro and micro influencers in order to target a large and diverse audience over a 3 day burst campaign. As the product would take a little extra explanation, Youtube played a large role in providing information and advice about the use of the IPL. This cleverly added more value and consideration to a larger ticket item. The less costly nail dryer was advertised through Instagram Stories. A brief explanation was provided, but more importantly the call-to-action created an urgency around the product. The project gathered a reach of just under 11 million.

We Influence

Location: Offices in Amsterdam and New York

Category of work: Fashion, Beauty, Lifestyle, Charity.

We Influence are a digital agency that specialise in search marketing and conversion rate optimisation. They largely use influencer marketing as strategy to drive sales and boost brand awareness throughout their vast network. We Influence values its ability to outreach potential customers, expanding online presence with its close-knit PR, journalist, blogger and social media influencer relationships. Experts in multi-channel campaigns, We Influence exposes your products to a vast and relevant audience.

In one of its most impressive case studies, We Influence teamed up with Miss Pap in order to boost session growth by 299% (YoY), as well as a 377% revenue growth (YoY). Contributing to this success, We Influence set out to use high profile bloggers, directly linking clothing items in the captions of their posts. As an additional motivation to improve click-through rates, Miss Pap provided discount codes which eventually contributed to more than 10% of their entire online revenue for the year.

Red Pill

Location: Office in London

Category of work: Fashion, Sport, Lifestyle, Food and Drink, Tech.

Red Pill are a London-based agency that specialises in crafting brand-based content that people are motivated to share with friends. With an in-house end-to-end production team, Red Pill pride themselves on providing strategy, creativity, production and distribution. All in a single process.

Separating them from the crowd, Red Pill host an unrivalled choice of influencers. They carefully track the audience statistics of over 70,000 influencers with data-driven selection pairing your brand with the most effective influencer. This helps to drive Red Pill’s belief in forming strong relationships between brand and influencer (rather than just an email for a paid post).

One of our favourite campaigns from Red Pill sees Zlatan Ibrahimović teaming up with Volvo in their ‘Made by Sweden’ campaign. The video appeared the day before the European Championships 2016, the scenic beauty of Sweden portrays the pride and honour Zlatan feels before representing his country. Tapping into Volvo’s Swedish heritage, Red Pill were able to convey Volvo as a pride of Sweden. This particular campaign reached over 32 million people.

Ykone

With offices around the world, Ykone seems to have made an impression on the industry. Ykone has always believed that the best way to create engaging, innovative content is to collaborate with some of the most daring digital content creators. Ykone creates successful international, visually innovate campaigns that impact and deliver tangible results. Despite this strive for success, Ykone do not only work with the most renowned talents but also collaborate with the rising talent of tomorrow.

Developing an inner database technology, ‘Campaygn’ has allowed Ykone to match you with the most relevant influencer. This search engine is based on 7 million analysed posts and is sorted by key metrics to ensure you are targeting the correct audience. This also provides a live campaign dashboard so you can manage and track data and identify KPIs.

One of our favourite Ykone campaigns saw Clavin Klein team up with 10 brand ambassadors who all held a solid following. The idea of the project was to push the theme of ‘visibility’ as representing their new perfume ‘Obsessed’. A photoshoot took place within the personal homes of the influencers. Some of the partners were also involved in the shots to portray the idea of obsession followed by the hashtag #CKObsessed. The audience was exposed to the personal, more intimate lives of the influencers making the advert appear authentic and genuine.

Viral Nation

Location: Offices in Toronto, New York.

Category of Work: Another wide range agency, working with clients such as Crayola to Match.com

Viral Nation prides itself for its ability to disrupt the status quo and deliver innovative marketing campaigns. Bragging one of the biggest exclusive influencer networks in the industry, Viral Nation sets out to craft genuine relationships between brand and consumer, provoking long-term retention and performance-driven results.

In an innovative and collaborative marketing campaign, Viral Nation teamed up with Angry Birds 2 and Red in order to promote the new version of the app and raise awareness of HIV Day. With the help of 6 influencers who all created individual content across various channels, the campaign create just shy of 6 million views and moved Angry Birds 2 up the App Store charts in every category. The campaign also played an important role in spreading the awareness of Red’s yearly campaign to tackle HIV, a great example of corporate collaboration.

Digital Visitor

Location: Offices in London and Bristol

Category of work: Travel and Tourism.

Digital Visitor hold a couple of offices in Bristol and London. These guys believe in the power of platform, and use social media personalities as a route to promoting tourist destinations. Digital Visitor have designed and use integrated digital services that combine strategy, creativity and execution. By delivering high impact marketing content for campaigns, Digital Visitor find positive results through transparent, precision targeted and performance-led digital advertising.

In a great example of their campaign ability they teamed up with the Aruba Tourism Authority to promote the Caribbean island as a romantic getaway destination (mainly for 18-30 year olds). Equipped with a tone of Aruba Aloe skincare products (representing the romance and destination of the island), the marketing team began to contact social media influencers who were in the process of planning honeymoons. Within 4 weeks they had secured the support of 8 highly influential beauty and lifestyle bloggers, who would go on to boost awareness of the remove destination. The end results? 64,000 unique content views that lead to 3,445 new marketing database subscribers.

IMA

Location: Offices in New York and Amsterdam

Category of work: Beauty, Lifestyle, Fitness, Tech, Food.

IMA (Imagency) is an agency with a global HQ in Amsterdam. Back in 2010, (the era of blogging) two of the young founders started up a fashion inspiration platform. After some success, a few years later Imagency was formed as a full-service agency. A place for brands who want to communicate with a wider audience through bloggers, vloggers and social media influencers. Today, IMA holds a dynamic, innovative and experienced team who strive to develop marketing campaigns that will boost your brands awareness, credibility and exposure.

In a refreshing and modern campaign, Nivea Men set IMA the challenge of tapping into the millennial market. The aim was to transform Nivea’s ‘traditional’ image into a brand that a younger audience would be proud to use. IMA had the idea to partner up Nivea Men and Real Madrid as a way to directly target a younger male audience. Influencers from all over the world were granted the opportunity to live as a Real player for the day, along with their followers. The project would eventually create over 45.1 million impressions and drive 1.8 million engagements.

Socially Powerful

Location: Offices in London, Beijing, Dubai.

Category of Work: Fashion, Tech, Food + Drink, Lifestyle.

Emerging from the beginnings of Facebook and YouTube, Socially Powerful was built out of the love for story telling through collaborative content. Creating partnerships with clients, these guys set out to develop a full understanding of your business’s commercial objectives. Priding themselves on diversity, the Socially Powerful team combines skill sets from different cultures to unite on one mission… ‘Hacking culture today, to build opportunities for tomorrow’.

In our favourite Socially Powerful campaigns, Hyundai challenged the team to share the thrills, passion and fun of the World Rally Championships. The motorsports and automotive audience would be the target demographic. The team partnered with two of the most prominent motorsports influencers for a week-long social media campaign; given i20 Hyundai Rally Cars, the two would tour the country and complete a variety of tasks along the way. Over the five days, the audience were given an all access insight into the World Rally Championships through the perspective of the Hyundai Team. Out of 120 posts, the campaign generated 5.5 million Story Views, and 2.2 million Video Views.

Hire Influence

Location: Offices in Houston, Los Angeles and New York.

Category of Work: Tech, Lifestyle, Food + Drink, Fashion.

Hire Influence describe themselves as a white-glove influencer marketing agency that unites brands with respected voices and digital audiences globally. In order to create the most innovative content, Hire Influence tap into the creativity and skills of media superstars. The result of this is user-generated content is the ability to spread the brands message through trusted, influential sources. By sourcing the best quality influencers, Hire Influence are able to generate a high-quality content and user reach.

In a clever and engaging campaign, the team worked with Private Reserve coffee to spread brand awareness and generate more sales. The team would capture Private Reserve as a quality product for any sophisticated coffee drinker throughout the holiday season. Influencers were contacted who fell under the millennial demographic of 20-35. The idea was to influence this ‘family and lifestyle’ audience to adopt Private Reserve as a gift idea. Each influencer would create their own gift basket featuring the product, writing about the items in a blog post. These would be shared through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. These gift baskets were eventually entered into a competition that readers could vote on. The campaign generated the engagement of over 4500 voters.

To Wrap Up

The agencies discussed are providing fresh and innovative campaigns that are leading the influencer marketing industry. There is however a lot more out there. Let us know if you think your agency should be on the list. We would love to find out about some of the groundbreaking campaigns you have conducted.

Influencer marketing is a fast-moving industry that demands brands to stay at the top of their creative game. Remember to keep on top of the latest technologies that can aid this kind of exposure. Look out for Shopcast in the coming weeks, a world-first influencer marketing tool that will change the industry.